The Story of 5SOS, Roland, and BOSS

5 Seconds of Summer on stage with the Waza Amps during the 5SOS3 tour. Photo: Andy Deluca

I’ll be the first to admit that when I first heard of 5 Seconds of Summer it was because of my niece Kayla. At the time, she was starting to get the hang of playing guitar and she said, “There’s this cool band called 5 Seconds of Summer, you should check them out.” I said, “Okay, but didn’t they open for One Direction?” She proudly said, “Yes,” and played a few songs.

How Long Are Your Cables?

What’s the difference between True Bypass and Buffered Effects Pedals?

This article is intended to clarify a topic that is often surrounded by misinformation. Our intention is to present the facts and help the reader make informed decisions about using buffered and true bypass pedals, and to achieve the best tone.

Tone matters. To guitar players, it’s that simple. Tone is the Holy Grail, the ultimate quest. But how do you get great tone? With so much guitar gear available, and with so much conflicting information out there, we’d like to clear up some of the confusion about the guitar signal path, stompbox pedals (both true-bypass and buffered), and other things that affect tone.

To get the best tone out of your rig, it’s important to understand the following principles and make decisions about cables and pedals based on them. More

Frank Zappa famously said, “A mind is like a parachute. It doesn’t work if it’s not open.” If you like your alternative stuff, you’ll probably appreciate the ability to go from gentle acoustic tones with massive reverb to a gut-churning syncopated rhythm in an off-beat. We all love the acoustic guitar, but it’s remarkably difficult to wear one with your electric, a problem solved with the Acoustic Simulator. And why limit yourself to one gain pedal? The SD-1 has a beautifully creamy overdrive effect, but a brutally distorted clipping tone from a fuzz pedal at low volume can be awesome in ambient passages. The DD-20 delay offers a huge variety of effects with four memories to save you tweaking on the fly, and the rotary speaker simulator and Dynamic Wah can be used to add some extra textures to your sounds. Experiment with their position in the chain to discover some unique tones. More

Subtle Effects for Blues Guitarists

The BD-2 Blues Driver produces a bluesy vintage tube amp tone that blues players have adored since 1995, and it’s still one of the best-selling BOSS pedals today. The pedal’s tube-like response is due to the level of distortion being proportional to the picking strength. The CS-3 Compressor helps smooth out those blues licks while adding sustain, and the TR-2 Tremolo gives you the smooth pulsing heard on so many records, adding that extra dimension. The FRV-1 Reverb pedal was developed with Fender and using COSM technology, the BOSS engineers captured the beauty of the 1963 Fender 6G15 unit which was a favorite among blues players of the 60s and so an obvious choice for this rig. More

Classic Rock is All About Being BIG & LOUD

Apply these tips to recreate the classic rock guitar sound. Thicken up your clean sound with chorus to get shimmer and movement. A phaser gives you that psychedelic 70s swirl and the RE-20 Space Echo will nail the warm tape echo sounds of yesteryear, with the added bonus of lush reverb captured from the original 1973 Roland RE-201 tape echo unit. The Power Stack emulates the gain and tonal characteristics of a wall of 4x12s – use with a clean amp for authentic stack sounds or in conjunction with your lead channel to make your amp work even harder, ensuring your self-indulgent solos are not only cutting through the mix, but melting faces. More

Overdrive and Distortion: What’s the Difference?

As guitar players, what are we all after? What do we struggle to describe, work to attain, but always know when we hear it? And what is all that gear out there for? The answer to all three of these questions is the same: great tone. With so much equipment available today to help in creating tone, how do we go about making it do what we want? Let’s take a look at some simple and effective ways to get killer tone with overdrive and distortion. More

BOSS Distortion – The Orange Ones

BOSS Distortion

A distortion pedal usually goes beyond the amount of gain and harmonic crunching typical of an overdrive. They tend to get more distorted, are usually (but not always) louder than typical overdrives, and often have multiple gain stages for abnormal amounts of sustain. The BOSS MT-2, probably the best selling distortion pedal ever, is a good example of a distortion pedal with those features. Since distortion pedals tend to be louder and have more inherent distortion than overdrives, it is a little trickier to use them in conjunction with the amp’s own distortion sound. It might be what you want, especially if you’re after a nu-metal, super heavy, or very grungy sound. If you use your pedal this way, you are distorting distortion. This can get pretty ugly, but sometimes it’s just the thing. Set your pedal similarly to using an overdrive to use it this way: For example, set the BOSS DS-1 level up, the distortion somewhat down, and the tone for neutral.

BOSS Overdrive – The Yellow Ones

BOSS OverDrive

There are two good ways to get tone from an overdrive. One is to use the overdrive in conjunction with your amp; that is, use the overdrive pedal to augment your amp’s inherent tone. Here’s how this works: More